The Solution
Kyle Putnam, MIG’s Director of IT, oversees the IT infrastructure for both companies. MIG had only one plant when Putnam joined the company to oversee the Solarsoft iVP implementation. “Then MIG purchased the second plant in Lexington during the implementation, so we ended up migrating two facilities with two completely different systems to Solarsoft, with a single go live for both,” Putnam recalls. MIG’s expansion didn’t end there. A few weeks after Solarsoft iVP went live in the Lexington plants, MIG purchased the wire and tube company and was live on Solarsoft iVP within two months. The system’s role had grown from managing two plants in Lexington with approximately 150 trading partners and shipping 2.3 million subassemblies per month to managing three facilities, over 250 trading partners and producing over 5.5 million subassemblies monthly. Regardless of the growing dimensions of MIG as an organization, each plant’s focus remains on its customers, who essentially evaluate them on two major criteria: consistent on time delivery and quality. Putnam says achieving either of those goals hinges on communication up and down the supply chain. Improved on time delivery and order accuracy.

 

Benefits & Results
From a customer satisfaction perspective, Putnam credits the tight integration of Solarsoft iVPs EDI with the solution’s realtime production reporting and serialized bar code labelling functionality in both the MIG and MIG Wire & Tube organizations for on time delivery performance ratings approaching 100%. “We rely very heavily on our integrated EDI and that’s where Solarsoft iVP really shines,” he says. MIG has also virtually eliminated mislabelled parts and, thus, has dramatic improved order accuracy. MIG Wire & Tube has also instituted full materials traceability on thousands of purchased parts, with MIG soon to follow suit at its Lexington plants.

MIG expects exceptional performance from its vendors, and a lack of EDI compliance is no excuse. “One of the reasons we selected Solarsoft iVP was to accelerate our receiving process, increase the
timeliness and accuracy of our inventory and eliminate the time our materials planners used to waste manually emailing and scanning documents for non-EDI vendors,” say Putnam. “So now we set all our non-EDI vendors up in Solarsoft eBusiness and expect them to send their ASNs before their product hits our docks. We send our orders to them via eBusiness and our vendors ship from our planning schedules.”

Solarsoft’s EDI and eBusiness have allowed MIG to set up a “pay by receipt” system for its vendors. Once a vendor’s shipment is received and entered into Solarsoft iVP, the system automatically
creates a payment voucher. With nearly 50 shipments hitting MIGs receiving docks daily this “pay by receipt” capability saves considerable time and bypasses potential errors associated with keying invoices manually. It also places the responsibility for ensuring shipping and receiving accuracy back on the supplier.
In addition, MIG saves significant time by eliminating paper based requisitioning and purchase approvals. Purchase orders are generated in Solarsoft iVP and automatically routed to the appropriate people for approval prior to an order being placed. POs are then matched to invoices. Similarly, Solarsoft iVP automatically
applies customer payments to invoices, replacing a manual process that took nearly a day. With the efficiencies facilitated by Solarsoft iVP MIG was able to consolidate all accounting functions for both MIG companies into one centralized department in Lexington. Putnam adds that Solarsoft iVP’s production planning and scheduling, along with its shop floor controls have made possible
a 30% reduction in overhead costs in MIG’s materials planning department. “We went from manually keying in production information to scheduling our production based on up to the minute collaboration with our customers. That allows us to keep our inventory current, which gives us better MRPs each week, which allows us to provide better planning schedules to our vendors, which
keeps our inventory lower.” In fact, Putnam says he can trace performance and efficiency improvements throughout nearly every facet of MIG’s business back to Solarsoft iVP. “The bottom line value of Solarsoft iVP is that it allows us to continually do more with less. We’re continually finding functionality to help improve our business by identifying opportunities to reduce workload on our people, so they can take on new responsibilities and manage more in the same amount of time.”